Traditional art and sketching

Peruse our Sketching from the Imagination series, start your own sketch journal, or try your hand at clay sculpting! If you’re a complete beginner looking for a new hobby, or even an experienced artist looking for inspiration and workflow insights, our traditional art and sketching resources have plenty to offer!

3D digital art

Covering a wide variety of software and approaches, our books, magazines, and eBooks are there to offer you the support and motivation you need. Whether you want to sculpt a monster in ZBrush or create a stylized character in 3ds Max, take a look at our range to start your next project!

In this month’s issue, we chat with Marcello Baldari about his Polysketches, Pior Oberson about his brilliant character designs, and Djordje Nagulov about his anatomical studies. Learn how to create environments with Vue and ZBrush, improve your work processes in Maya, brush up on your Polypainting skills, and much more besides.

ZBrush is a powerful program offering digital artists of all levels intuitive and inspiring workflow solutions for 3D models and 2D images. Following on from the success of other ZBrush titles such as ZBrush Character Sculpting: Volume 1, this new book focuses on the design and creation of a variety of character and creature sculpts by world-class artists including Mariano Steiner, Maarten Verhoeven, Caio César, and Kurt Papstein.

This three-part tutorial series focuses on creating a realistic and detailed sculpt within a set time limit. Three artists – Daniel Bystedt, Nils Meyer, and Mariano Steiner – are given a base mesh and a set time limit, and over the series, strive to demonstrate some of the best methods for creating a perfect humanoid sculpt in the ever-popular ZBrush software. Each tutorial covers a different character, from concept to refining texture and general finishing, and aims to pass on some useful techniques to aid you in creating your own speedy 3D images (perfect for portfolio building!). There are no set specifications, and artists are free to be as creative as possible under the set time limit, so stand by for some interesting outcomes in this fascinating series.

If you’ve ever wanted to know more about modeling, texturing, rigging, animating and lighting in Autodesk’s 3ds Max software, then this book is for you. The chapters in 3ds Max Projects deal with diverse topics including modeling characters and vehicles for beginners, character rigging, animation and topology, blending 3D and photography, and FX particles and dynamics. Written by 11 top industry artists, including community favorites Matt Chandler, Andrew Hickinbottom and Diego Maia, 3ds Max Projects is designed to be a one-stop resource for those looking to create 3D masterpieces.

We have got so much great content in this issue that it is hard to know where to start, but we will kick off by talking about this month's interview which is with Jian Xu. Jian is a brilliant artist that has been setting the CG community a blaze with his amazingly realistic sculpts, and his ability to create such accurate skin.

Originally created by Seong-wha Jeong, the Swordmaster character has now been recreated in 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave and XSI by a talented team of artists. This precise, step-by-step tutorial shares how to produce this highly polished, low poly game character with detailed texturing for real-time rendering.

Originally created by Seong-wha Jeong, the Swordmaster character has now been recreated in 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave and XSI by a talented team of artists. This precise, step-by-step tutorial shares how to produce this highly polished, low poly game character with detailed texturing for real-time rendering.

Originally created by Seong-wha Jeong, the Swordmaster character has now been recreated in 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave and XSI by a talented team of artists. This precise, step-by-step tutorial shares how to produce this highly polished, low poly game character with detailed texturing for real-time rendering.

Originally created by Seong-wha Jeong, the Swordmaster character has now been recreated in 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave and XSI by a talented team of artists. This precise, step-by-step tutorial shares how to produce this highly polished, low poly game character with detailed texturing for real-time rendering.

Originally created by Seong-wha Jeong, the Swordmaster character has now been recreated in 3ds Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, LightWave and XSI by a talented team of artists. This precise, step-by-step tutorial shares how to produce this highly polished, low poly game character with detailed texturing for real-time rendering.